The history of meteorology is a history of the artifacts and insights of modernity. It is, in some measure, a history of imperial aspirations and invention; a history of attempts to understand, predict, and even control phenomena that extend far beyond the local horizon and that change constantly on time scales ranging from geological eras and centuries to decades, years, seasons, and moments; a history of how individuals, immersed in and surrounded by the phenomena they study, attempt to construct privileged positions and address social and political imperatives. These essays, from eight of the leading historians of weather and climate, illuminate the hopes and struggles of researchers and practitioners from the eighteenth to the twenty-first centuries, across a diverse set of issues, and on a vast array of spatial scales. If the book raises new questions or provides a measure of insight into old ones; if it stimulates in the reader a sense of the "otherness" of a bygone era or a sense of empathy and continuity with the past; if it conveys in any measure the contingency, curiosity, excitement, and frustration of the science and politics swirling around issues of weather and climate, we will deem it a success. We offer it with our sincere wish that it serves as a stimulus to related explorations in other areas of the history of science and technology that juxtapose the intimate and the universal, the local and the global.
James Rodger Fleming is a historian of science and professor of science, technology and society at Colby College. He earned degrees in astronomy (B.S., Penn State), atmospheric science (M.S. Colorado State), and history (M.A. and Ph.D. Princeton) and worked in atmospheric modeling, airborne observational programs, and as historian of the American Meteorological Society. Professor Fleming has held major fellowships from the Smithsonian Institution, the National Science Foundation, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and the American Association for the Advancement of Science. His book, Fixing the Sky (Columbia University Pres, 2010, paperback 2012) received the Sally Hacker Prize from the Society for the History of Technology and the Louis J. Battan Author's Award from the American Meteorological Society.
Jim has been a visiting scholar at MIT, Harvard University, Penn State, the National Air and Space Museum, the National Academy of Sciences, and the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars. Awards and honors include election as a Fellow of the AAAS "for pioneering studies on the history of meteorology and climate change and for the advancement of historical work within meteorological societies," election as a Fellow of the American Meteorological Society, participation as a contributing author to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, appointment to the Charles A. Lindbergh Chair in Aerospace History by the Smithsonian Institution and the Roger Revelle Fellowship in Global Stewardship by the AAAS, and a number of named scholarships and lectureships including the Steinbach at Woods Hole, the Ritter at Scripps Institution of Oceanography, the Beinecke at Yale, the Vetelsen at the University of Rhode Island, and the Gordon Manly Lectureship of the Royal Meteorological Society.
Jim is a resident of China, Maine (not Mainland China!) He enjoys fishing, good jazz, good BBQ, seeing students flourish, building the community of historians of the geosciences, and connecting the history of science and technology with public policy. "Nothing is really work unless you would rather be doing something else."
